The Calorie Myth

Nutritionist and fitness expert Josh Bezoni’s book “7 Day Belly Blast Diet Plan,” gives you the greatest belly blasting tips! However, without self esteem and confidence you’re not going to get the results as Josh shares with us in part 4.

Today, the expert gives us a simple calculation for determining how many calories you need to consume to lose the weight.

So let’s see what it is.

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Craig: Now, I’m going to ask you how important is tracking? Tell us how much time did your past transformation contest winners spend on tracking? Where they only tracking their nutrition, their workouts, or was it even more than that? Tell us the most important information that we need to know about tracking.

Josh: What’s the saying? If you fail to plan you’re planning to fail.

Craig: Yes.

Josh: There’s nothing I’ve heard that’s more important than that, and it’s so true. Tracking! I write down what I eat when I’m in a program where I’m trying to get fast results. Just the mere fact of writing down what you’re eating has great effects. There have been scientific studies of people who write down what they eat, it holds them ACCOUNTABLE so they the lose weight. This is why tracking is extremely important. I think people should track their workouts, what they eating, how they’re feeling during these times, and what works and what doesn’t work.

Now, some people like me, are not planners or a tracker by nature. I’ve never wanted to keep a journal or anything about my life. But you can come up with systems that are very easy for you to follow. Here’s an example. I know this is a little crazy but back in the 1980’s Richard Simmons of all people had a program called Deal a Meal.

Craig: Oh, yeah.

Josh: It gave people these little cards and when they ate what they were supposed to eat the card goes from one side of the wallet to the other. He made millions off of this idea. I remember watching this as a kid. My mom bought the program. I do something similar. I’ll put anything in my pocket, like quarters, nickels, dimes. Quarters represent protein, nickels represent carbohydrates, and dimes represent fat.

I’ll put change in one side of my pocket, and as I eat my food during the day I’ll know I’ve got to eat a certain number of proteins, certain number of carbs, certain number of fat servings. Each one is a portion that I’ll move from one pocket to the other. When the change runs out, I don’t eat anymore.

It sounds silly, but I do that. You can do that with something on your desk, you don’t even have to write the stuff down if you know you’re not going to be able to follow a program like that. Some people love to track everything, and they’ll get online and they’ll track every little morsel, and they’ll look at the nutrition content, and they’ll track their vitamin C intake. God bless them.

That’s not me, so I come with alternative approaches that I know will work for me like I just described. That’s a bit of a tip there.

Craig: That’s pretty cool. Now, we’ve covered a lot of good stuff for beginners, but let’s talk about the best way for people to determine how many calories they need. If they’re going to that level, and I’m not even sure if in your program that people are going to need to because they’re going to be focusing on those whole natural foods, but what are the best ways for people who are just getting started to get a good idea of how many calories they need?

Josh: Basic rule of thumb that we’ve always used in the past when we used to do a lot of calorie counting with athletes and other people whom we worked with was if you’re trying to gain muscle weight anywhere from 12 to 15 calories per pound of body weight. If you’re trying to maintain and maybe lose a bit of fat and gain muscle about 10 calories per pound of body weight. If you want to lose weight you take your BODY WEIGHT TIMES THE NUMBER EIGHT.

That’s a very simple way to determine how many calories you need and it’s very general. Your age, gender, the amount of exercise you’re doing on a daily basis, all of courses affect that. If you weigh 200 pounds and you want to lose a little bit of fat and maybe gain a little bit of muscle you’re at about 2,000 calories a day.

Those are really general guidelines. The problem that I’ve seen over and over again is most people won’t track calories. People who are advanced and love to go to the gym and love nutrition track their calories, other people won’t. So, that’s a challenge and why I recommend people count portions instead like I was talking about earlier.

The other problem is a calorie is not a calorie. There’s something out there I call the calorie myth. The calorie myth is that every calorie no matter where it comes from is a calorie in your body acting the same way, but it’s really not the case.

For example, if you have 100 calories of let’s say chicken breast, your body will use 20 percent of those calories to digest the protein, because protein is a very COMPLEX molecule and nutrient. So, 20 percent of the protein will be used to digest and assimilate those protein calories you just ate. Whereas white flour or sugar really doesn’t have much of a thermic effect at all, your body will just absorb it and fat is pretty low also.

So, the stomach effect of food is also something to keep in mind. When you have something like slow cooked oatmeal about 10 percent of the calories that you consume will be used to digest and assimilate the food. So, there you go again, when you eat more complex natural foods that take your body work to digest you’ll actually burn more calories in the digestive process, we’re not talking about one percent or two percent, we’re talking about as much as 20 percent.

In my new program I incorporate that as well. It’s not just calories, it’s not just this calorie myth, but it’s actually combining foods the right way so you can help burn a lot of the foods you’re eating just by combining them the right way.

Craig: Very cool.

Join us tomorrow where nutritionist expert Josh Bezoni explain to us what happens when fat gets stored in our bodies. Click here to see part 6.

Craig Ballantyne is the Editor of Early to Rise. He took over after Michael Masterson in 2011 and is doing a good job carrying on the legacy that is Early to Rise.
He's also a Strength & Conditioning coach in Toronto, author of Turbulence Training, a contributing author to Men’s Health magazine, and a member of the Training Advisory Board for Maximum Fitness and Oxygen magazines.
Crai...

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Yeah, tracking, while it can be a complete pain, can have a crazy effect on your diet, and the simple reason isn’t b/c people don’t want to write down everything they eat, it’s b/c at the end of the day, if they do keep an accurate journal, they want to see a clean and good list. Something to be said for wanting your ‘to-do’ (or ‘have-done’) list looking neat & tidy…or however you want it to look…at the end of the day.

Cool idea, too, about the coins…

http://www.decidetostayfit.com/blog Beachbody Coach

As usual, great Q and A Craig. Great idea using the coins for the portion approach.

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